


Assassin’s Cliché Credo

by ember_alda



Series: Realms of Influence [14]
Category: Katekyou Hitman Reborn!
Genre: Adoption, Alternate Universe, Angst, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-19
Updated: 2012-03-19
Packaged: 2017-11-02 05:37:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,057
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/365517
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ember_alda/pseuds/ember_alda
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The last thing Squalo had was love for anything. There was never anything that deep between him and the kid; how could someone love a figment, a possession? But owning something for that long comes with a responsibility, and even though Yamamoto turned out to be a sieve and not a bowl in which to pour his skills, there’s still a tie that needs to be cut.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Assassin’s Cliché Credo

**Author's Note:**

> For the prompt: _Squalo kills Tsuyoshi and Yamamoto’s mother while on his quest perfecting his sword technique. He picks up the orphaned Yamamoto and raises him_.

It was the third time that night that something had gone wrong. The soft, yet noisy cries that filled the plain room came only from one corner of the tatami floor. Highlighted in chiaroscuro by the back light in the frame of the door, Squalo is a dark form that looks like the least assuring thing in the world. As soon as the light from the family room is blocked, the child stops.

He can only look down at this short, squalling thing and feel nothing but disgust at himself for being so unlucky. His hand reaches down to tug at the bamboo sword clutched in the brat’s hand in a tight, unforgiving grip. Finally, exhausted from pile of mishaps that weren’t supposed to color this one stop journey, he scoops the kid up, sword and all, and walks out the deserted sushi shop.

-0-

Since Squalo didn’t know anything about children he wasn’t sure if they were all this quiet or not. The kid likes to stand in the corner of the living room, staring at him as he bursts through the door after another day of rapid phone calls and follow ups in Japan from the Varia main branch in Italy. It’s unnerving how Tsuyoshi’s kid seems fixated on him, following every movement with dark, restless eyes.

Instead, week after week he opts to ignore the brat and simply flops on the couch undisturbed each night, leaving Yamamoto to stare at him as he flipped through the pages of a dog eared book. When his phone vibrated on the table he knew it was two hours later and he would make a brief and sparing dinner, plop it in front of the kid and go back to his book. The silence threaded unnaturally though those days made him vaguely uncomfortable, but the last thing Squalo wanted to deal with was a wailing brat.

When he comes back and starts on his daily routine again, the kid is inched forward closer than usually. As each minute passes he glances over to see Yamamoto gravitate to the couch. Even an hour later, when the brat finally stops and glued to the same spot with the same stare, there’s little indication he will budge the focus of his eyes. Squalo tells himself he only read fifteen pages because he was tired not because the itching feeling in the back of his head from being watched, by a _child_ , was distracting.

A blink later he sweeps the toddler up onto the couch, and slams open the book on the table, revealing an array of colorful pictures in reds, blues, purples, and yellows. Each picture was labeled extensively and in beautiful detail. Squalo lets Yamamoto stare in awe at the illustrations before he starts talking.

“If you’re going to waste your time, be productive and learn.”

Across the anatomy chart, he starts showing Tsuyoshi’s kid all the vital points on a human body.

-0-

Every night falls into routine, again. He’d raise the kid up to the couch and make him recite all the deadly points on the colored pages of the anatomy book, first in Italian, then in Japanese. After their hours lesson he’d shove off the brat and tell him to eat something. Yamamoto would go to the refrigerator and carefully pour out a glass of milk to the brim then snatch up the pre-made bento bought at the convenience store and bring it to his lips, eating as slowly as possible. It was trained in him not to spill a drop or leave a kernel of rice around. Squalo already yelled long and loud about it after the first three times it’d happened, and Yamamoto had quick reflexes for a child.

Then he’d be let out into the back where in that fifteen by fifteen foot square of grass, he would practice various forms of standing while Squalo corrected his stance for near on three more hours. The first time Yamamoto had to use a cardboard tube. Squalo had caught him holding the Shigure Kintoki a few times, naked blade unsheathed and already cut both palms. He screamed about the blood and messy brats, and then he threw bandages at him to clean himself up. When he sniffingly botched the job Squalo yelled again, but sat him down on his lap and fixed the roll of gauze and wrapped them tightly. Afterward, with a paper tube in hand, he showed him how to hold a sword properly.

The next day he was given a miniature bokutou, and forced to learn how to swing a sword without hurting himself. It progressed over time till he did drills everyday with the stern but interested taskmaster. Yamamoto practiced hard because it was the only time Squalo deemed to pay attention to him. 

In the morning, when he woke up to an empty house and the soft ticks of a lonely clock, Yamamoto wouldn’t be sad. He quietly wiled away the time doing chores and studying from his books, trying hard to be studious because in the late afternoon when the door burst open with a loud bang, he could finally be relieved. 

Whenever Squalo came into the door, he’d find the kid sitting cross-legged on the floor with a book in hand or watching T.V., beaming up at him like he was father Christmas. It was another variation on a theme over time, first it had been silent stares and somehow it morphed into this greeting the older Yamamoto got. It becomes unnatural, soon, when the boy isn’t in the room when he gets back.

-0-

When Squalo passes by the sports shop, his eye is caught by the splash of green on the poster, intersected by a few sandy lines and diamond shaped plates. The open space of the vast field is cut only by one small figure and a barely seen ball from the wide angel of the shot. He’s arrested by the gleam of a chrome bat sitting in front of the display, and decides to go in.

In the back there are racks and racks of clubs, rackets, and bats. His hand automatically reaches out and touches the smooth, steel surface of the chrome one he saw in the window, fingers tasting the cool glide of metal. 

“Boys get restless being cooped up all the time. When they get fidgety nothing but clean outside air will shake it out of them.”

He tries to tell himself that he doesn’t care what he heard one old woman say to another in the small coffee shop he went to that morning before his slew of meetings for the day. The kid wasn’t cooped up in the house, he knew where everything was. If Yamamoto wanted to leave he could leave, and so what if he didn’t go to school yet? Squalo taught him all he needed to know to handle a sword, and that was the only useful piece of knowledge Yamamoto would ever learn. It doesn’t matter to him that everyday he’d go back and see the stupid kid lying listlessly on the floor, playing the same video game for the tenth time, that Yamamoto’s bed was made neatly and the apartment was spotlessly clean because there’d been nothing else to do but tidy up, that the only time the kid seemed to have real energy was when they were fighting. 

It doesn’t matter if it was unnatural for a kid that age to be so calm about every damn thing, in fact it was good! When Squalo was younger he had nothing but drills everyday, strict schedules, and endless berating from his instructors, and he turned out fine if he could say so himself. If anything the brat had it easy!

It doesn’t stop him from giving the artfully displayed bat and ball an accusatory glare. The store manager peers around the counter to see what the hell Squalo is doing. He’d been here an awful long time, standing in that exact spot, contemplating the newest series in baseball bats. A loud VVOOOOIII of frustration echoes through the mostly silent store as finally Squalo sweeps his arm across the stand and takes up the damn thing to the cash register.

When he gets back Squalo dumps a black bag onto the wooden floor of the room with a clunk where Yamamoto sat, wide eyed with a remote in his hand.

“Go out and get some fucking exercise tomorrow.”

-0-

He goes to school now, it fills up the time in between when his guardian leaves for work in the morning and when he comes back. When he’d joined a local baseball club the manager got suspicious of his free time and soon enough he was scowlingly enrolled. His days were filled with endless things to do, now. Homework to be done, friends to meet, baseball practice, and sword practice too. Everything Yamamoto was forced to excel in, Squalo taking him to task if he slipped in his grades or if his swordsmanship deteriorated. 

It doesn’t stop him from noticing things. Most people, he found out, don’t teach their kids how to shoot a gun at the age of ten. They don’t do drills till they faint from exhaustion from the age of five. Squalo’s always busy all the time, his job seemed to not have any breaks or days off. His phone calls are always loud but mysterious, he walks out in broad daylight with his sword strapped to his side like it was nothing, and at night, before he falls asleep there are shadows in the road, figures blotched by dim streetlamps. When he tells Squalo in the morning his guardian says he must be dreaming, though the furrow in his brow doesn’t smooth away until the next time when those mysterious people in the night are gone form his bedroom view. 

It’s easy to figure out, after a while. When Squalo staggers in saying he’s tired and goes straight to his bathroom, when he sees the remnants of brown flecks dotting the older man’s laundry, when each day that deadly sword presses near not to defend but to maim, sighting out every vital point. 

Yamamoto is not a stupid boy. Squalo never taught him to be one, and despite the mounting evidence, he tells himself not to look too hard when through that door, even with all the new things he has now to do, he feels that tremulous light flooding inside him at the sight of one loud man stomping through the entrance. He knows his place isn’t to question, but take in every piece of time spent with Squalo and learn it well.

-0-

The door’s perfectly fine but even still the way it’s wedged open trickles unease in his gut. Yamamoto quietly comes in and slips the bag from his shoulder, eyes flitting about the undisturbed apartment, remembering back to those odd times when he’d seen strangers in dark suits surrounding the street when he was young, and Squalo quietly pulling him back from the window to scowl down at them.

He goes to the drawer and shakily takes out the small caliber Colt and quietly makes his way up the stairs, shoes shorn and light on socked feet to the open door on the right. In the dim twilight of the room, there’s a blotch, right near the post of the bed, and before he could ask the stranger what the hell he was doing the figure turned around, eyes startled by the second person who came back into the house. A blade, sharp and dripping comes flying towards his face and Yamamoto can’t dodge so he squeezes the trigger in his hand in panic.

There’s an ocean of silence being filled as the body continues to bleed on the floor. Squalo can’t get up from his bed and Yamamoto’s arm can’t stop shaking as he looks down at a man he’d killed, not with a blade but with a gun.

Sighing, the long haired man pushes aside his covers and gets up. The boy can only slowly drop his arm, eyes wide as Squalo picks up the gun and sets it on the nightstand.

“They’ve been desperate recently. I left earlier today to lure them out. I thought you weren’t supposed to be back until seven.”

Yamamoto can’t stop the trembling in his limbs, his stare at this stranger’s slumped form fixed and mute. He looks up at Squalo who seems unchanged, perfectly stoic with the sword strapped on his arm that had been ready to slice through the intruder the moment he came lose enough. It wasn’t hard to figure out that this gambit had been ruined by his arrival.

“I-it was poisoned. I saw the knife it was dripping something-”

There’s no hint of surprise but a long, lingering look at the scattered knife on the floor, where it gleamed dull from the thick coating smeared across the edge. Squalo had been turned around and underneath the comforter, unable to tell that it was dipped in poison.

He gets up out of the bed and stands up, toeing the body on the ground up, and glances over at this boy who suddenly had his first taste of their reality, however close he’d brushed past it before. Squalo quietly, gently takes his arm and guides him out the room, and with the softest tone he’d ever heard, and said,

“Don’t come in here until I tell you to. You should go out with someone somewhere for a few hours.”

The small, desperate grip on his sleeve is torn away, and Yamamoto can only plead with Squalo to stay with him silently, before he’s brusquely sent down the stairs. The numbness in his hand from the backfire won’t fade away, the ringing won’t stop, but in his eyes, he sees the dull drip from the attacker’s knife and can’t deny what he’s done.

-0-

“He’s back. He’s _back_.”

Squalo has to grip the phone to his ear tighter in order to keep it in its place. This call is the last thing he expects and suddenly, he’s jolted out of this vague, feverish dream he was living in ever since he came to Japan.

“Fuck, you _better_ not be lying. This must be why they sent someone after me, they knew he was coming back soon.”

“You’re coming back.” That much wasn’t a question. “The boss’ll be in Naples next week so book a flight for the twentieth.”

“I’m not a fucking idiot just make sure everyone else is there.”

Him and Levi hang up the phone. Squalo stands still in the kitchen for a while longer, contemplating the end of his long exile from his mother country. Eight years he’d spent, wasting away his time and trying to improve his sword, challenging any and all other competitors to keep himself strong until the day he faced the boss again. Somehow, it sticks in his throat that this call was so unexpected. Squalo is not a person who settles down easily, and definitely not somewhere like _Japan_.

“You're going to take me with you, aren’t you?”

Of course the boy had been listening, what the hell else did he expect? Squalo simply sneers at Yamamoto’s blank and expectant face, unable to even imagine any scenario in which that would ever happen. There’d been no tremor in the kid’s voice, though this was the first time Yamamoto likely heard of his recall back to Italy, and like everything else with him Squalo can’t help but feel the build of frustration rooting deeply inside his gut. He has to cut off Yamamoto’s stupid need to cling to him right now.

“We don’t have time for fucking undedicated kids. Either you’re going to use those skills I taught you or fritter yourself away on _baseball_. You can’t have both.”

The way the kid smiles, half laughing, half regretful, as he sets his gear softly on the table, is another thing Squalo doesn’t understand. He certainly didn’t teach the damn kid to be so off handed.

He mutters lowly to himself as he turns around. “I knew I would regret getting you that stupid bat and ball one day.”

As always, there’s a surety in the kid’s voice as his eyes close in a sunny smile, taking the cup of tea gratefully from Squalo’s hand and setting it down on the small kitchen table.

“Do you?”

He doesn’t know where the hell Yamamoto gets this confidence from, as if he held all the keys to everyone’s soul and simply could unlock words Squalo was sure he didn’t even own. He tries to shake off this feeling, like he’s surprised that all in one go Yamamto had acquired his own characteristics, that he wasn’t the same strange, quiet clone that came with him in to this house the first night he’d taken the brat back, obeying every lesson without hesitation. The dissonance between then and now rubs at Squalo the wrong way, and he can’t delude the teenager any longer.

“It’s fine to waste your time on it when there’s nothing else better to do, but you have to get serious now. You need to choose your path and cut off other ties if you want to move forward.”

It’s a direct stare as he says those words, drilling his meaning into Yamamoto and pinning down the root of both their problems. There’s a softness in the younger boy’s gaze that won’t waver no matter what, and somehow Squalo feels disconnected, they’re drifting on two different planets of meaning that can’t coincide anymore.

“It’s a waste to throw something that much fun away, right? If you dedicated yourself to something, even without meaning to, isn’t it sad to just let it go without any thought? Even if it started out to waste time, it became important.”

Squalo pushes himself away from the table, the loud scrape of the chair ringing in defiance to the kid’s words as he stalks out to go and pack. He couldn’t’ listen to this shit anymore.

“Don’t tell me what’s right and wrong, you’re still a kid so don’t act up to your betters. You’ll do whatever the hell I tell you to, so don’t expect any mercy from me.”

When the kitchen is empty of all but Yamamoto and his cup of rapidly cooling tea, he sets his hand down by his bag, mouth still turned in a tenacious smile.

“I never expected it.”

-0-

It turns out that a Mos Burger is opening near their house, and all the kids at school are talking about it. Yamamoto and his friends passed by the constructed site many times, and it was finally almost finished. Him and Ochida had several conversations about how convenient it would be to go somewhere together after baseball practice whenever they walked back from school, until one day Yumiomi told them about the story behind the place.

It’d been a sushi restaurant owned by an older couple who recently moved to Namimori, they had a son and were looking to settle down. Not a year had passed by before the man and his wife were found slaughtered by a sword, of all things. In this day an age it had been rare enough that it stayed in the news for a long time, and the boy had been missing and presumed dead. It was said Tsuyoshi had defended himself as best he could, multiple slash marks found on furniture and the walls suggesting armed combat, but in the end they both had died.

Yamamoto had been fascinated by the story in a morbid way, sucking in the tale of murder like old Japanese ghost stories, until Ochida asked what their names were. 

That night, Yamamoto didn’t go home right away. Instead, he stayed out camped in front of a new Mos Burger trying to shake the feeling rising tensely that coincidences like knowing swordsmen who knew deadly tactics were rare, that Squalo had never told him he’d been picked up but he still knew he wasn’t his son. That there was more than one Yamamoto in the world who’d been displaced, and that he wasn’t a special person, just a kid who couldn’t possibly be connected to something so outrageous.

Somehow those fragments come together and those slow years he spent being cared for by one gruff man had been fastly coming to an end. He was going to be abandoned, left alone when he didn’t know what alone ever was. When he crosses the threshold in the morning the room is empty, like it always was. Yamamoto lies in his bed, staring up into the blankness of the wall, squeezing those flying pieces of thought desperately for a direction, for what he should do, for what he should ask.

It feels like in no time the door bangs open at night, and the boy is jolted out of his concentrated daze. He leaps out of his cocoon, mind still unprepared, and grasps the sword sitting plainly against his bedroom wall, walking out to greet his guardian. He doesn’t know why he chose to pick up the blade but somehow, faced with that unsurprised look on Squalo’s face he feels like it was meant to be.

“Why did you take me?”

There’s a vacuum of silence. Squalo only deems to move one small step, sliding the bag off his shoulder onto the floor. His eyes are straight, piercing through every meaning in his words until finally, he talks.

“After I was done with him she burst in. I had no fucking clue she was back but I cut her down because she couldn’t live after seeing his body. Then there was you. I figured the whole shitty incident out after I found you in the corner. Tsuyoshi’d been distracted the whole time trying to keep me from finding out you were in the corner, no wonder it’d been so easy. Tainted the entire fight, I should’ve known something was off.”

“I really love you, but I have to do this. I don’t hate you for it, I just-”

“Don’t have to fucking explain yourself kid. Just get on with it.”

The last thing Squalo had was love for anything. There was never anything that deep between him and the kid; how could someone love a figment, a possession? But owning something for that long comes with a responsibility, and even though Yamamoto turned out to be a sieve and not a bowl in which to pour his skills, there’s still a tie that needs to be cut.

If he kills him, he’ll be disappointed in how shoddy his handiwork has turned out to be. Squalo never expected anything less than perfection from himself, and if Yamamoto falls before his skills, there’ll be bitterness in how poorly he handled Tsuyoshi’s kid. If he dies, however unlikely in the extreme, he’ll still be disappointed in himself. Either way Squalo will end up holding the short chain, and yet, he thinks to himself, it wouldn’t hurt to be disappointed for once in his life.

There’s nothing he would change to alter this confrontation. It’s not about who Yamamoto is or what he’d done that botched night in the sushi shop. This is something else entirely.

Readying himself, he takes the kid out back to that familiar patch of grass, hidden away by the tall pine trees that form a fence around their yard. It doesn’t matter that it’s pouring down a storm. The wavering sheets of clear rain distorts the space between them, making things magnified and distant all the same. Despite the hindrance everything is surprisingly clear in the muted tones of the back park. There’s a bright, unremorseful light that warms the quality of Yamamoto’s face, somehow making him look younger, and older at the same time.

“I hope you’ll forgive me.” 

He doesn’t know if Yamamoto means for living, or for if he dies, but knowing how cleverly he raised him, likely it’s all of that. There’s no more room left for words as the wet shine of the kid’s silver blade strikes, meeting Squalo’s cold, but unaccusatory face before he readies himself to kill his last mistake.

Either way, this will be the last conquest in his series in Japan.

 

THE END


End file.
